00:00 - Bryan Schielke:
So Jeremy, you've helped 30,000 people leave stable careers to become business owners. What separates the ones who succeed long term from the ones who romanticize entrepreneurship?

00:09 - Jeremy Ames:
We talked to thousands more people than actually end up moving forward in buying a business.

And so if there's one gap that I see for the people that never move forward, they have the dream and they kind of either dip their toe in the water or never really move forward. It usually has to do with the fact that they haven't invested the time to get to true conviction.

And what I mean by that is I don't think conviction and belief happen for most people right away. And in fact, if it does, it often leads to people being unsuccessful in the future because they jump in with this belief that everything they do is going to be golden. And then they pick something that's not a good fit and they end up failing.

It takes time. And so I like to tell people when they're considering business ownership, figure out how much time you can invest on a weekly basis and just think of it as a part-time job to do this exploration to figure out what your path could look like.

Too many people treat it like it's a one-way door long before it has to be a one-way door. It doesn't have to be a one-way door until you need to quit your job or put a lien on your house or tap into your savings. Up until then, all the exploration is free and you can play around with ideas and look at what you might do and see if you can get comfortable in that belief and conviction that it makes sense to move forward.

And if you do that, what I can promise people is you will find conviction. The conviction may be this is not for me. It may be this is not the right time in my life. I need to wait until my kids graduate from high school before I'm going to have the time and focus to do this.

But I would say it's worth spending the time to get to conviction because otherwise you have one of two choices. You're going to end up at the end of the day or the end of your life going, I wish I would've had the courage to do something to maybe go toward my dream. Or you're going to be somebody who jumps into this blindly and maybe gets into something that's not going to create a great outcome for your life.

So that's what I would say to the people who are aspirationally business owners.

In terms of the ones that separate in terms of success, I think the people who are successful are really focused on learning the business and how to be good at that business. I'm always worried when I see someone who comes in and says, I want to own a business and I want to work on it five hours a week and never have to be in the store or the location.

You can get there, but you're not going to get there out of the gates because every business has a learning curve. You've got to figure out who the customers are, the right culture to make this work, and the right strategy.

The people who are invested in learning and growing themselves so they can become the person that the business needs, those are the people who succeed. The business requires something different from you at every stage, and as you grow, it shifts. You realize pretty quickly that you're almost always the blocker in some way. It takes years sometimes to figure out how you're blocking it, whether you're taking too much control or you're not willing to take the right risks.

So I would say when it comes to the difference between people that are successful, it's this learning mindset.

03:11 - Bryan Schielke:
Absolutely, makes sense. All right, terrific. All right, let's move to the next one here.
You've been a five-time founder, a business acquirer, and a franchise owner. Which path taught you the hardest leadership lesson and what was it?

03:25 - Jeremy Ames:
I've learned hard lessons from them all, Bryan.

One of the things I've learned is which path is the best fit for me, and it's changed over the years. When I was young, the best path for me was startup. It's creative, I had a ton of energy, and I had not that much to lose. It was the perfect fit for me to explore and create and build without the restrictions in place.

Franchise was never a good fit for me, not because there's inherently anything wrong with franchises, but because they already have so much of it figured out that if you're a really creative person who gets claustrophobic with boundaries, it's not a great fit. And it wasn't a great fit for me. I did it three different times, even recognizing that every time I felt that same way.

I think the biggest lesson I learned was when I had this idea for an alternative investment platform. It was based on the fact that we were serving people who were using retirement funds to invest in all these really interesting assets. We had lots of people coming to us that were interested in the concept but didn't really know what to do.

So I had this idea and I concepted it and I hired a team and I brought on a CTO and we put four or five hundred thousand dollars into this, got an office space, built a website, and nobody came.

It turns out Field of Dreams is bullshit. You can't just build the field and then the people magically come. I had skipped all the steps of saying who's the customer and how can I go spend time with those people that I think are the customers and figure out what they need and what they're willing to pay for.

So that was probably the hardest lesson, and I think it was the thing that taught me humility as a business owner. Just because you've been successful in one business does not mean that you can immediately take the next idea you have and turn it into a successful business.

They all require going through a thoughtful process of being clear about who you want to serve, how you're going to be different, and how you're going to deliver it in a way that's unique and sustainable in the long term in terms of profit.

05:17 - Bryan Schielke:
Yeah, makes sense. I love the Field of Dreams reference. That's fantastic.
Many of your clients are midlife professionals with mortgages, families, and retirement on the line. How do you personally think about risk differently at 45 than you did at 25?

05:32 - Jeremy Ames:
Well, I'm 48 now, so I don't even remember what I thought of risk when I was 45.

So much different. I remember I was at a conference and on a panel during entrepreneur week, and this one woman asked, Jeremy, how did you get the courage to open your first business?

I thought about it for a second and I was like, I actually don't think it required any courage to start my first business. I was 25. I didn't have anything. I didn't have a mortgage. I didn't have kids. I didn't have dependents. I had all the time in the world, and if it didn't work out, I could have just gone and gotten another job and done something different.

What changes when you're in your 40s or your 50s is you've got real responsibilities. You've got people that are counting on you. So this idea that you can just go take this big jump that might involve a pretty big bet on yourself can maybe feel a little selfish, and I would say probably should feel a little selfish unless you've taken the time to do the work to think through it.

Because the reality is in business, nothing's guaranteed. It's all just a game of probabilities. You can stack the odds in your favor, but you've got to be willing to do the work to find the right business that's the right fit, where your strengths are going to come through and move that business forward.

It's not like you just magically pick any business out of the bush and then plop yourself in and expect that great things are going to happen.

07:00 - Bryan Schielke:
Yeah, absolutely makes sense. All right, great answer.
Guidant started with $10,000 and a laptop and became the leading provider in 401(k) business financing. What did you do early on that most founders underestimate when they're trying to scale?

07:14 - Jeremy Ames:
My answer to this is maybe going to sound funny because it wasn't intentional.

When we started the business, we thought we were going to go raise millions of dollars and that's how we were going to scale this thing because it was the early 2000s and that's what you did. That was the aspiration.

At one point we even brought on a third partner who was a Silicon Valley guy. He had all these connections and we thought he was going to help us raise money. Well, a year into him being on the team, he hadn't raised anything because it turns out the business we were trying to do wasn't really fundable. It wasn't going to be a billion-dollar unicorn ever.

And so we were forced, because we didn't have a lot of money, to go find customers right away. We had to produce something of value out of the gates.

When I look back at all the businesses I've been a part of from a startup standpoint that have been successful versus the ones that haven't, we've always had that constraint. Even the one business that we've raised money for, we didn't raise money until we already had some threshold and a handful of clients where we had a proven model. Then it was really, hey, we need this because we want to bring on the team to scale it.

I think a lot of people look at lack of capital as a constraint. Well, it is a constraint, but they also look at it as a blocker to them being able to move forward.

I would tell you, at least from the startup standpoint, it can be a blessing because it will force you to have a great idea, something that actually works in the real world, before you can scale it.

So we were lucky in that we couldn't actually do the thing that we thought we were going to do strategically, so we had to find another way.

08:43 - Bryan Schielke:
Yeah, the revenue proves the model, right? Love it, that's fantastic.
You write about skepticism as a strength rather than a weakness. How should leaders develop conviction without becoming blind to real downside risk?

08:46 - Jeremy Ames:
Yeah, it's a good question because there's a balance there.

The people that succeed are the ones who believe. You have to believe. If I came to you and said, Bryan, I'm going to run a marathon, and you said, Jeremy, do you believe that you can run a marathon, that you could actually do the 26 miles, and I said no, I actually don't believe that, what do you think the chances are that I finish the marathon?

Probably zero, right? Because at some point in 26 miles, if there's any thought in your mind that you can't do this thing, you are going to shut down and not move forward.

Whereas I have a buddy who didn't train at all to do a marathon. He showed up, ended up walking most of it, it took him like seven and a half hours, he was almost immobile for four weeks, but he finished it.

So it's possible, but I think the way that I think about managing this is I think about this concept of following my fear. Instead of treating my fear as something that should shut me down, I think fear is a natural part of what everyone has that's designed to give you signals about things that are going to keep you safe.

Now the problem is much of what triggers our fear responses is crap. It's stuff that either has to do with trauma from the past, where we've been hurt or didn't succeed in this other thing before, or it has to do with something we actually have a knowledge gap about.

If you start to follow your fear and think about what is this fear telling me, if it's a knowledge gap, you can go close knowledge gaps. Especially now in this world, we are at a point where you have no excuse for not being an expert in anything you want to be an expert in. You can go figure it out if it's a knowledge gap.

If it's a trauma gap, if it's this idea that I've been hurt before, that's something you can process and deal with. You can think about how can I turn this trauma that I've had before into something that actually helps me be successful in the future.

And in some cases, it's actually pointing out a real risk. I remember talking to a client who bought a bed and breakfast in the Virgin Islands. Their idea was to go from their jobs in New Jersey to live in the Virgin Islands and operate this bed and breakfast. The biggest risk that they saw was hurricanes.

So they did a couple things that were really interesting. For one, they learned what it takes for the survivability of buildings based on hurricanes. And what they found was that some of the older buildings that had been constructed in certain ways with certain types of foundations had a much higher survival rate in those hurricanes. So they targeted that in their search.

Then they also went through the analysis of what would happen if a hurricane hit. If a really bad hurricane were to happen, it's going to take out the Wi-Fi and electricity and all the things. Then what's going to happen is you're going to have massive crews of people that have to come to the island to fix all that stuff.

So what they ended up doing was getting satellite Wi-Fi and a backup generator. And when a big hurricane hit, they were more full than they had ever been because all of the people who were there to do the construction work stayed at their place because their place was functional. They had Wi-Fi, they had power.

So it was a really genius way of saying take the things you're worried about and turn them into something that can actually help you move forward.

12:14 - Bryan Schielke:
Wow, creative problem solving, that's really cool. Awesome. All right, last question here.
After building multiple eight-figure businesses and serving in EO leadership roles, what does reaching the summit of your career mean to you now compared to when you first started?

12:28 - Jeremy Ames:
The big thing that's on my heart right now, Bryan, is I see this massive divide that's happening between the haves and have-nots in our economy.

I'm seeing the value that's accruing to people who own things. Real estate's going up, stock values are going up, the value of businesses is going up, and yet wages are stagnating.

So one of the big things I've been working on is how do we create an environment in our business where employee ownership is an opportunity, where people can not only benefit in the upside of the business, but we actually start to teach them some of these skills of ownership.

Because ownership isn't just a physical possession of assets. It's a mentality. It changes you. When you start to realize and learn that you have agency, you start thinking about problems differently. You don't go, that hurricane is going to come and therefore I just can't do this thing. You think, if a hurricane came, what would I do? Then you start playing through the scenarios and you figure out a path forward.

So that's a big part of what we're working on now culturally. For me it's sort of full circle. I've been passionate for 20 years because becoming a business owner changed my life, and I love what we do because we get to help other people make that jump and take control of their futures and become business owners.

And I've always felt this disconnect that we don't really do that same thing for our team. So the mode that we're on now is trying to help our team learn our business, being more transparent with the finances, teaching people how to take ownership over profit line items and figure out what drives success or failure in the business and how we keep score, which at the end of the day is profit.

If you're not generating a profit, then we're not going to be around for long. And if we're not around for long, then we're not going to be able to give people jobs and have them have a cool place to show up and work.

That's where my heart's at, where those two things intersect. How do we create more owners and how do we create an opportunity for people within the businesses that we operate to not only learn that mentally, but to be able to participate in that financially?

14:26 - Bryan Schielke:
That's fantastic, love it. Well, I wish you nothing but luck with that for sure and continued success with everything else you've been doing.

14:34 - Jeremy Ames:
Thanks, appreciate it Bryan.